22 April 2013 8:56 AM

A good week: US Senate says no, Constitution safe, Obama turns nasty

This is my column from Monday's Irish Daily Mail

Two encouraging things happened in the last week, but you may well have missed them in the flood of horror coming from Boston.

First, the EU’s carbon emissions trading scheme – that’s the fake, made-up market which was launched eight years ago to encourage moves towards low-carbon energy sources -- has been left near-dead after a vote in the European Parliament.

Yes, global warming propaganda has been defeated by economic reality: jobs and growth matter more than theories about glaciers and polar bears.

The MEPs rejected a proposal to support carbon prices in the dying market. Such ‘environmental’ policies have been loading up the cost of power in the struggling economies of the EU. Now even the usually-pointless MEPs have seen that expensive environmental policies have to stop.

But that’s not the really big good news. No, the big news was a jaw-dropper.

On Wednesday, attempts by President Obama to get restrictions on gun ownership through the US Senate failed, and failed because even some Democrats voted against the Bills.

This was not expected.

What followed was as nasty a response as we have yet seen from this president. Worse, he spoke to the Press with children tucked up near his podium: it looked very like the human shield of children Saddam Hussein used on camera in the run-up to the first Gulf War.

Mr Obama claimed that some of the Senators had voted as they did because they worried that ‘that vocal minority of gun-owners would come after them in future elections. They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-Second Amendment.’

He called it ‘a shameful day for Washington.’

He complained about ‘lies.’

What the President wouldn’t admit was that some – or maybe many– of the Senators voted down the Bills because the Bills would have made bad law, and because they are worried about the Obama administration’s continued efforts to erode the Second Amendment right of each American to protect himself and his family with a firearm.

(And don’t you think that many people living alone in rural Ireland wish they had that right? In Ireland, one is offered only Justice Minister Alan Shatter and his policies as midnight protection up a boreen. Some would prefer the liberty to choose Smith & Wesson instead.)

Rather than considering that as the reason for the defeat of the legislation, the President ascribed the motives of fear and cowardice to his opponents.

That is a stupid thing for a chief executive to do.

He has to work with the Senate. Calling them names when they choose not to do as he tells them is an arrogance for which he – and the slim Democrat majority in the Senate -- may pay in the November 2014 elections. To remind: one-third of the 100-seat Senate is up for election every two years.

The President’s outburst was also stupid because, after claiming that the Senators were wrong to be influenced by pressure from voters, he told his own anti-gun ownership lobby to get out and threaten Senators in the November election themselves. So which way does he want it, that Senators listen to voters, or don’t? Apparently he wants Senators to listen to just one side.

Anyway, the facts don’t fit the President’s threats. Even the pro-Obama, deeply-Democrat Washington Post had done the sums that show his threats are near-empty: ‘Of the four Democrats who voted against the background check amendment, three are up for re-election in 2014… It is hard to imagine President Obama or his political organisation going after three of their own given that the battle for the Senate majority in 2014 is expected to be very, very close.’

As for the Republicans, Senator Susan Collins, the one Republican who is up for election in a state which Mr Obama took in the last election – that is, a state in which a Republican Senator would look more vulnerable -- actually voted for the gun control Bills. After that, it is hardly likely the Obama revenge-lobbyists will be able to go after her seat.

So for the moment the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms is safe. In the months after the shooting at the school in Newtown, Connecticut, last December, it looked like the emotions aroused by the murders would sweep aside resistance to increased federal control over gun ownership.

Again to remind: the US Constitution only restricts what the federal government can do, not what the states can do.

Even then, the right to own a gun is not absolute under federal law. Federal courts have upheld federal laws that limit the sale, possession and transportation of certain weapons such as machine-guns and sawn-off shotguns.
The 50 states remain free to pass their own laws covering possession and carrying of firearms.

For example, the Connecticut legislature is free to pass ferocious gun-ownership restrictions if that is what the people of the state want. The US Congress can’t stop them.
Before the Newtown murders the Connecticut legislature had already put in place gun restrictions which were reckoned to be the fourth toughest in the US.

What killed the children at Newtown was not a lack of gun control, but a mentally-unstable 20-year-old who first stole guns from his mother and murdered her, apparently because he found out she intended to have him committed to an institution.

Meanwhile, the other 164,999 gun permit holders in the State got on with their peaceful lives. Unfortunately, none of the teachers at the school were armed that day – guns are not allowed in Connecticut schools -- so the killer knew he could murder without being challenged.

It is no coincidence that most of such shootings occur in schools and other ‘no guns allowed’ places. So many Americans now have permits to carry concealed weapons that any would-be killer who tried to shoot up, say, a Pizza Hut, is likely to find half the queue is armed and ready to return fire. Which is why trying a mass killing in such a place is almost unknown now.

Yet if you still believe that more guns mean more killings, you need to understand that the facts point in exactly the opposite direction.

The safest countries on earth are the ones with the highest civilian gun ownership: number three on the global list of civilian gun ownership is Switzerland, with 46 firearms per 100 population. Fourth on the list is Finland. Number 13 is Canada. And so on through Austria, Iceland and Germany with 30 guns per 100 population.

America has the highest rate of gun ownership, but is only 28th in rate of firearm murders.

Because of such facts, the Newtown shootings haven’t swept in new legislation on a tide of emotion as President Obama hoped. Always after such shootings – such shootings at schools by young men inevitably on psychiatric drugs -- only started in 1997, Americans remember how important it is to protect the right to own a gun.

Once the shock eases, Americans realise the truth: that children are threatened by many things, sometimes by mentally-disturbed young men who steal guns, as at Newtown.

Sometimes, as at the Boston Marathon, children are killed by ball-bearings and nails packed into a bomb made by evil young men.

Or as at Philadelphia, where an abortionist is now on trial for the murder of children, they are killed by scissors.

Yes, Dr Kermit Gosnell is accused in the deaths of a mother and seven babies.

Babies who were subject to a late-term abortion and lived were allegedly killed by Dr Gosnell. The evidence is that he snipped their spinal cords with scissors.

One witness, a former medical assistant, testified that Dr Gosnell had joked that one baby, alive and breathing, was so big he could have walked to the bus stop.

None of the charges against Dr Gosnell, though, covers the deaths of the boy children and girl children who were killed within the womb at that deadly clinic. Yet we won’t be seeing Obama cluster boys and girls around his Press podium in an effort to stir up emotions against such slaughter.

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MARY ELLEN SYNON

Mary Ellen Synon is based in Brussels as a columnist at the Irish Daily Mail and contributor to the Mail on Sunday.

At other times she has worked as: a columnist at the Irish Sunday Independent and the Sunday Business Post, Ireland correspondent and later Europe correspondent at the Economist, an associate producer at CBS News 60 Minutes based in London, and a reporter for the Daily Telegraph.

Early in her career she was awarded a travelling fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to allow her to study the Common Market.